Research Interests

Doctoral Research

Sadness is an emotion that is created, reproduced, articulated and withheld during internal dialogue and external conversations and interactions with others (Goodrum, 2011). There are cultural rules and pressures that surround our decisions regarding when, how, and if, we express our sadness (Goodrum, 2011; Hochschild, 2012; Horowitz and Wakefield, 2007). Such cultural pressures are making their way into the hospital setting, although to what extent emotion is having an impact on healthcare professionals and patients is vastly undiscovered (Ofri, 2013). Studying emotion should be of primary concern in patient care since emotion largely influences the cognition of doctors (Groopman, 2008). Emotion is an extremely important element in terms of patient care and understanding emotion within the patient and doctor interaction is essential for “maximizing the quality of medical care” (Ofri, 2013: 5). Furthermore, the emotional environment is also important for patient care. The emotional environment is the combination of the emotional state, need, and response from an individual (O’Toole, 2012). It is important for health care professionals to recognize and accommodate the emotional environment in order to achieve more positive doctor-patient interactions and to also support time efficiency (O’Toole, 2012).

Despite medicine being viewed as a high tech scientific practice, the doctor-patient interaction is social and human (Ofri, 2013). Medical school prepare doctors to be emotionally distant from patients and instead focus on treating and curing patients (Ofri, 2013). There is not enough being done by medical schools that assist doctors in dealing with areas that fall outside of fixing people (Gawande, 2014). It is the primary concern of my research to assist in some aspect of this issue by furthering knowledge on sadness within social interactions in medicine. Perhaps if interactions, perceptions, and management of sadness by, and between, healthcare workers and patients is uncovered and better understood, then emotional tools and training can be developed in a way that benefits everyone within healthcare. This is expressed by Ofri (2013) in that “learning to recognize and navigate the emotional subtexts is a critical tool on both sides of the exam table” (5). This study will aim to accomplish this by conducting an ethnography of the daily interactions between healthcare professionals and patients where sadness is involved. The study will triangulate understandings through the addition of interviews with healthcare workers to give such participants an opportunity to offer a personal response to the descriptions provided by the ethnography. This case study will offer much needed information and understanding to an important and greatly underserved area in the healthcare system.